ZinZen®
Work together with the people you know — while your information stays on your own phones and computers, unless you choose to share it.
This is early software you can already try with others. It is not a finished product. Please do not rely on it alone for anything you cannot afford to lose.
The idea in one breath
Most tools for planning and teamwork want your whole group on one company’s servers. ZinZen® takes another path: each person keeps their own copy of the shared work on their devices. When you are online, those copies catch up with each other. When you are offline, you can still keep going.
You do not need a ZinZen® account. You name the people you know the way you already do — not as a username on a global network.
Who it is for
Local communities and coops. Plan orders, bookings, shared tools, or a small marketplace — without forcing everyone onto one vendor’s platform.
Households and everyday groups. Keep home lists and plans in one place, next to community or project groups, without mixing them into one public feed.
People who care about keeping control. Your devices hold the main copy. You decide what leaves a group. You can run the connecting pieces yourself if you want.
People who do not want AI in the middle. Everyday work in the app is meant to run without AI. If optional writing help is used at all, it uses a model or key you provide — not a ZinZen® “generate for me” by default.
Your groups
In ZinZen®, a group is a real shared space: a household, a farm coop, a local marketplace, a project team. You can belong to several, and you may have a different role in each.
Inside a group you keep lists and plans, chat, photos, and what needs attention. The home screen shows what needs you across the groups you have joined — without dumping every group into one public timeline.
Your data stays with you
The main copy of your work lives on your devices. A small connecting service helps your phones and computers catch up when they are online. It is not meant to become the permanent storehouse of your private history.
You can use several devices. They keep working when the network is down, and catch up later.
Sharing is a choice
Nothing leaves a group unless someone decides to share it. Public listings are separate from private group work: finding someone in a public place does not drop them into your household or home group.
When many independent groups publish only carefully chosen facts — availability, prices, partners — a bigger picture can appear that no single group holds alone.
- You own your data.
- You control what is shared.
- Together, a bigger picture becomes possible.
See it and talk
Short demo videos show how the early app looks and feels. Getting the app onto a computer or phone still takes some technical steps today — see the section below, or the FAQ.
Feedback is very welcome — questions, rough edges, ideas, or anything else. Contact me by email, Signal, Matrix, or Mastodon.
For technical readers
The rest of this page is for people who want the architecture, terms, and how to try or self-host the proof of concept.
Federated Resource Planning (FRP)
FRP is the framing beyond classical ERP: keep information local, work offline, share only what you choose — coordination across independent organizations without a mandatory central platform holding everyone’s private operational data. The infographic above sketches that fit.
ThingCollections, Things, activity
A ThingCollection is the lived workspace (household, coop, marketplace, project). Hierarchical Things, chat, activity, photos, and workflows sit inside it. Activity answers “what needs attention?” across collections you belong to, without one public feed.
Local-first sync and identity
Each app install is a sync endpoint. People appear under local petnames you choose — not a global identity provider. Multi-device sync goes through a relay when online; offline read/write is part of the design. There is no required ZinZen® login.
Public dataplane
Outward sharing is deliberate. Public discovery uses redacted catalog rows on a separate public dataplane — never backfilled from private relay history. Contact from public space opens a thin coordination space first; it does not admit someone into your home collection.
Stack and sources
Tauri desktop + Android, Rust event store and sync, TypeScript UI, Axum relay, optional definition registry and Garage-backed public datasets. Architecture decisions are written as ADRs. Expect a PoC, not a polished SDK. Design notes and app PoC live on Codeberg.
Definitions, Studio, accessibility
Collections can adopt versioned Thing definitions and FlowGuides. Studio aims at domain authors with progressive disclosure. A visual language for everyday workflow editing (inspired by the Workflow Patterns catalog) is a design direction — not a finished product feature yet. App UI catalogs cover English and Dutch; accessibility targets WCAG 2.2 AA for the shared web UI (not fully claimed yet).
Try it and self-host
Desktop (Linux, Windows, macOS) and Android: build from the
app PoC
— not in app stores. Ubuntu Touch has an
OpenStore
listing — untested so far (no Ubuntu Touch test device on hand).
Hosted PoC relay: relay.zinzen.me. This about site does
not distribute installers.
Self-hosting typically means sync relay, optional definition registry, optional public dataplane object store. The PoC ships containers and K3s/Traefik-style manifests; DNS and TLS are yours. DIY — not a one-click appliance yet. Devices still hold primary data.
Inspiration
Among other sources: Valueflows, Marcus Meindel’s Advanced Sharing and Distributed Economic Planning.
License
Code is under COMMONS (steward: ZinZen® B.V.) — inspectable and usable by individual humans under that license; not an open-source or free-software grant.